CONSIDER a farmer in South Punjab applying for a loan through a banking app. He has no credit history, no employment record, no documented collateral. What he does have is 30 years of ploughing the same piece of land, paying his debts in cash, and raising a family on seasonal income. Most Western-trained AI models do not understand his reality. They see absence where there is, in fact, a life that qualifies. Rejection is swift. Second chances, rare.

This is what algorithmic bias looks like for Pakistan: AI that is imported, imposed, and institutionalised.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Pakistan is unlikely to develop its own frontier AI models anytime soon. The cost of a single training run now runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. In a multi-trillion-dollar industry, US tech firms alone are projected to invest $650 billion by 2026, a figure much larger than the size of Pakistan’s economy. So, despite our fanciful ambitions, no ‘ApnaGPT’ is underwriting our national debt anytime soon.

What we will continue to do is adapt global models for local use. This poses enormous risks, ones our AI Policy 2025 has largely sidestepped.

Our AI policy has not addressed some big........

© Dawn